For Ludum Dare 31, we created PhotoBound. For those of you who have yet to play, you may want to play it first to avoid spoilers. One of the biggest parts of the games is figuring out what the game mechanics are. For those of you who have played, or you just don’t care, PhotoBound is a game about a tourist who is essentially ‘stuck inside the camera,’ meaning he is limited to only being able to move inside the viewport. The viewport does not follow the player; rather, the viewport actually follows the player’s camera, which the player can lift and move around. Unlike usual, this game does not have any enemies, and the player is unlikely to die too much. We decided that enemies didn’t really fit into the environment very well, and that our programmer Jellonator was too lazy for such things. We are very happy with how our game turned out, and are excited to see how the Ludum Dare community receives it.

The Good

The Graphics- In the beginning the graphics felt a little hard to get inspired for. Ultimately our artist found some other tilesets around the googleverse and effectively redrew them in  his own style this set, and this set being the major inspirations. He also used Arne’s 64 color palette to keep things cohesive but still have a lot of freedom with the colors. The only part that could’ve used a major overhaul was the player and I’m sorry. I’m just sorry. You can watch the Artist’s view of the LD in his past broadcast on his Twitch.

The Level Design- If you look at our past submissions, you’ll find that level design did not exist in our past games. This is a result of our programmer Jellonator being lazy and not implimenting a level loader. however, This time is different. Our lazy programmer finally added a level loader, and level design was back in action. Being able to create actual levels after so long felt great, and the levels we created are pretty good, despite being a little rusty at the level designing process. We probably could have used the mechanics better, and maybe should have challenged the player a little more in the late game.

The Bad

The Boxes- After implementing boxes, we found a little bug: sometimes boxes would stop colliding. This issue was pretty minor, since the circumstances were pretty uncommon, and the box could still be picked up anyways. We managed to fix it during crunch time.

The Music- Our composer, MK, didn’t make the music until a last minute rush a few hours before the deadline. The music is Fami with VRC6 expansion because N163 is overused. MK claims to be a tool.

No Real Background- An actual background would have been nice, but we never really thought to add one during development. Woops.

The Ugly

The Collision- The collision engine was a wreck after implementing platforms and adding the ability for solid objects to crush the player. This resulted in several hours of collision code and debugging and player dying just by touching the platform and– it was pretty messy. These issues did get fixed, but the loss of precious hours was upsetting. As a side note, a pretty big bug where the camera would glitch through the platform in level8 made it to release. This bug was fixed the day after release, and probably never should have existed anyways. For some reason, this bug only existed in certain builds, probably a result of some kind of floating point whatnot difference between machines.

The Level Loader- The level loader was created a few hours before the LD started; consequently, it was pretty buggy. The bottom right tile didn’t load, platforms loaded incorrectly, and sometimes would downright crash the whole game. It was pretty unreliable. We ended up fixing it, but it was a huge mess. Since we have a proper level loader now, this issue should not arise in the future.

The Windows Build- Since our programmer uses Linux, he must cross compile with MinGW to create Windows executables. A crash arose early on regarding this. The Linux executable would run just fine, but the Windows executable would crash every time. The issue ended up being a vector initialization issue, but it took a few hours to figure this out.

The Conclusion

Our Ludum Dare 31 game is one of our favorite LD games we have ever created. We had a lot of fun with the design process of our game. Sure, there are a few issues here and there, but hey, we had only 72 hours, of course there will be issues. We hope to receive constructive criticism so that we may improve in the future. 10/10 would make again.